Windows Audio Sucks Monkey Balls
There are two simple things that Windows should really be able to handle by now, but can't. (1) I have a Soundblaster card driving my external speakers, and a BitHead USB headphone amp for listening with cans. Switching between the two output devices involves going deep into Control Panel, then, when I finally switch devices (from speaker to headphones, say) I have to shut down the application I'm using, and restart it to get audio to "flip over". What's up with that? (2) I'd love to be able to set the audio level on an application by application basis - so that I can have Media Center playing in a window either muted or at low volume, while my browser is playing a video at full volume. How hard would that be? Amazing how poorly this works.
December 21st, 2009 - 14:54
Update: Windows 7 has the second feature I mention above: sound levels can be set for each application, which is nice. There is a way in the Windows 7 Mixer application to change between speakers and headphones on the fly, but all programs I’ve tried have ignored this setting and need to be restarted to pick up the new output preference. I’m guessing this is for backwards compatibility – it actually works for the Windows 7 system sounds.
January 4th, 2010 - 01:58
Kieth, I don’t know how “into” audio you are, but you mentioned your soundblaster card so I thought I give you a little input (no pun inteded) on windows 7’s new driver stack that was apparently dug up from the xbox development trash as far as I can tell. DirectSound doesn’t exist any longer, low latency ASIO drivers are flaky, if they work at all under 7 and the mixer is even more of a clusterf*** than it used to be. I am a KX driver project user (open source and totally sweet SB drivers) that has been forced back to XP because M$ broke all my killer audio apps. When will they learn that reverse compatibility and configurability are requirements, not wish list items? I guess as soon as linux starts taking more of the market share….
Peace.